As I understand it, he's looking for something that would behave much like an online bookmarking service -- but save text instead of url's so you could have tag-organized quotes/paragraphs/etc. -- useful and relatively simple. Opera has a built in feature for saving notes (though it's not tag based), I believe there's a firefox extension that does it but am not sure what it is (and don't know about it and tags) -- as for web services, I don't know of one that does this explicitly. However, almost all bookmarking services allow you to store a comment with them, so you could essentially use an online bookmarking service to do this -- you'd still be bookmarking the page you got the text from (references are good anyway, right?), you'd just use the tags to focus more on the content of the snippet rather than the overall page. A workaround, but a semi-viable one.
